7 Mar
2012
7 Mar
'12
7:31 p.m.
Reminds me of a story I once heard about Ken Thompson.
He was once transporting Belle (the chess computer he developed)
out of the contry. Because of the belief at the time that shipping anything with a
greater computational power than a slide rule
would end western civilization as we know it, they asked him if it could be used as a
weapon. He responded, "only if you drop it
out of the plane on someone."
Konrad Zuse did the opposite: he allowed the German military to believe
his Z4 relay computer was actually part of a missile system, in order to
obtain transportation out of Berlin. See pages 91-92 of his
autobiography at http://bit.ly/zFLLF8 and his son's version of the story
at http://bit.ly/xrcdKq.